Welcome to the new blog!
September 5, 2011 in Blogging, Misc, Technology, Websites
I'm back, baby!
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Deep exhale.
Finally, I have successfully migrated my old blog from pacejmiller.wordpress.com to my own domain at pacejmiller.com. It was a little shaky at first but I think the blog has finally settled in.
The Big Move
To cut a long story short, I ended up doing it all myself, and it took a good couple of days and hours and hours of messing around and reading (and deciphering) online guides to move the blog over from the WordPress domain to my own purchased domain (from SiteGround) and to get it into the shape it is now.
In a previous post, I mentioned that I was going to pay the $119 fee for WordPress.com to do a ‘Guided Transfer’ for me, after previous attempts to export the material on my old blog to new blog failed miserably. However, as it turned out, WordPress can only do Guided Transfers for people who have purchased a domain from one of their affiliates. So I got the kind engineers at WordPress to do a full refund for me and I proceeded to do the damn thing myself, including how to redirect traffic from the old site to the new one.
For those interested to learn how it is done, I am going to do a post shortly that sets out exactly what I did, where I looked and where I sought assistance. Hopefully it can help people in my position — ie, want to move your blog to your own domain but don’t really know what the difference will be and find the whole process a little overwhelming.
New Blog, New Features!
The first thing you’ll notice on this new and improved blog is that I have a new theme. From day one I stuck with Regulus (a free theme from WordPress.com) and it served me fine for more than two years, but I felt it was time to go with a slicker, more professional look that made better use of the space.
So I ended up picking a new theme called Custom Community by Themekraft. Custom Community is also a free theme but you can upgrade it (for $39) to gain access to more custom features, widgets and so forth. The best thing about this theme is that it already has plenty of customisation options — the ‘how to’ guides are not necessarily the best, but if you muck around with it for long enough you’ll eventually figure it out.
The most noticeable difference with this new layout is that I have a massive slideshow just below the banner. I have customised the slideshow so that every time someone opens the Home page it will display four random posts from my new ‘Best Of’ category. Essentially, I picked out around 20 or so posts which have either been highly popular at one time or another or represent some of my better works and ideas and put them in this category, and I customised the slideshow to show posts only from that category and at random.
The second main difference is the three image boxes directly under the slideshow, which lists my three most recent posts. Personally, I would have preferred to get rid of them but they are not customisable in the free version of the theme. [Correction: I just figured out that you actually can get rid of the post list under the General/Default Homepage tab under Theme Settings but I realised the blog looks better with them so I put them back in]
The biggest hassle with the slideshows and image boxes is that I have to create these new Featured Images on my existing posts. There’s a new box in the new post creation screen and I have to separately upload an image to it — and the image has to be resized (to 756px in width) in order for it to fit properly. And I had to crop the images in cases where the slideshow zoomed in on the wrong part of the picture. Hours of work, I tell ya. Hours of work.
Those are the most obvious differences but boy did I have to do a lot of stuff. Even though migrating your blog keeps all your old posts and comments, etc, none of the widgets in the sidebar are moved over, so I had to redo everything from scratch. On the bright side, it allowed me to clean out a lot of the old stuff and links that weren’t being used.
Lots of other customisations that you probably won’t think much of but took me forever. For instance the header of the blog (that little blue strip of the night sky), which I grabbed from my old theme — that alone took like three hours because I had to get the size and placement exactly right. The drop down menus as well — the colour, the shape, the shadows — all that crap had to be customised.
One of the biggest changes I’ve had to get used to is all the Plugins that I have to install in order to replicate some of the features I had on WordPress.com as well as the new ones to give me additional features that weren’t available on WordPress.com. It’s been a struggle but I am slowly coming around.
The next step is to install Google Adsense and other advertising mechanisms to take advantage of the ability to advertise (something which WordPress.com prohibits). I’ve already signed up for Adsense but it might take a few days before the application is approved.
Another thing I will have to go through is the wealth of information provided on SEO (search engine optimisation), which is crucial if you want to increase your blog’s exposure and traffic.
In the meantime, life will be back to normal and I will continue to pump out posts. I already have a handsome backlog.
Anyway, take a look around at the new site, check out the new features, and let me know what you think. Any comments or suggestions would be much appreciated!
Farewell, Borders
June 5, 2011 in Blogging, Misc, On Writing, Social/Political Commentary, Technology
I had been wanting to write about this ever since news broke a few days ago but for whatever reason held off — maybe hoping that it wasn’t true or that it was a mistaken report.
Oh well. There’s no use denying it anymore. The last remaining nine Borders bookstores across Australia will close down over the next six to eight weeks. The fate of the Angus & Robertson chain, also owned by the in-administration REDgroup, remains uncertain at this point. The only good news is that its online bookstores will remain open.
I still remember the first time Borders opened up in Australia years and years ago. I loved them. They had the broadest range of books and I could spent literally hours and hours browsing from one end of the store the other. It was perfect for people with short attention spans like me, who just want to read the back cover, maybe read a few pages, and move on if it doesn’t interest me.
When I was living in Cambridge (which had all the big booksellers such as Waterstones, WHSmith, Heffers, etc), I pretty much camped out at Borders. Nothing to do? Let’s go to Borders and read all afternoon! Books, comics, manga, magazines, whatever. It was better than any library.
But that was the problem. People loved to browse Borders but not buy from them because their books were so bloody expensive, particularly in Australia (I’ll get to that in a sec). If they were on super duper special, then maybe, you’d consider buying a book or two, but everybody knew that Borders was a place where you went to do your research, not the place you’d ultimately purchase the books from.
These days, especially, it’s all online. Not just e-books but also paper books from places such as The Book Depository and Amazon. Yes, if all things were equal, Australian consumers would no doubt want to purchase locally — but when prices were, excluding GST, 35% higher, or in many cases, 50% higher, financial considerations always trumped loyalty.
No wonder Borders struggled so much. The stores tended to be in areas where the rent was ridiculous. They required loads of staff and the wide range meant stacks of inventory. Without competitive prices, they really had no chance.
Interestingly, the online chatter that has come out of the closures have been similar to my sentiments. Most bemoan the loss of a terrific place to ‘browse’ books, but not much more than that. Some were even glad that these evil big book chains which bully the independent booksellers have gotten their comeuppance.
Does this represent a fundamental shift in the publishing industry? If supposedly mighty bookchains such as Borders are collapsing, it makes me wonder what the future holds for other chains such as Angus & Robertson and Dymocks, and to a lesser extent, Kinokuniya.
Is it finally time for the parallel importing restrictions to be lifted? For those who don’t know, Australia has in place restrictions intended to protect local publishers and writers. If an Australian holder of publishing rights to a particular title decides to publish it within 30 days of the book becoming available elsewhere in the world, then Australian booksellers are prohibited from importing the title from overseas.
A Productivity Commission report in 2009 recommended that these restrictions be lifted, partly because the bulk of the benefits stemming from the restrictions flowed to offshore publishers and authors, rather than local ones. The recommendation was never acted upon because of campaigns from domestic publishers and authors, who also have very valid arguments. Opening the already fragile Australian book industry to the rest of the world has potentially frightening consequences for everyone.
No easy answers, unfortunately. I just hope the remaining bookchains in Australia have enough support to keep battling on.
Farewell, Borders.
Tags: Angus & Robertson, Book Depository, books, booksellers, bookstores, Borders, Borders Booksellers, Borders Group, Cambridge, closing down, closure, e-books, publishing, REDgroup, W H Smith, Waterstones
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